HTML
Sep 5, 2011
admin
Comments Off

HTML and Meta Tags for Search Engine Optimization

Search engine optimization is the process of improving a webpage’s visibility. Search engine optimization considers how search engines work, what people search and the actual keywords typed in for query by the users. Search engine index websites based on the hits the websites receives and the quality of the content on it. Now HTML is the most basic building block of any webpage, so, as a marketing strategy, search engine optimizations consider HTML and Meta tags for higher rankings in the search engine’s indexing.

What exactly is a Meta Tag?

The first tag which resides in an HTML code is a <HEAD>. The meta tag lies within this header tag which contains additional hidden information about the webpage. Well formed meta tags always written within a name and value pair. Meta tags generally have the following form <meta http-equiv=”name” content=”content”> and <meta name=”name” content=”content”> with these three basic attributes:

  1. content: content in a meta tag has the valid string and provides value for that particular name enclosed in double quotes.
  1. name: name in a meta tag has the name which is to be associated with the content value. The name can be anything, but the most commonly used names are keywords, description, author, robots, copyright etc. For example a site for calculating the distance between two points has the following meta tags:

a)      <meta name=”keywords” content=”latitude longitude distance bearing points earth…”>

Keywords are based on the basic words or tiny phrases depending upon the content or the niche on which the content is based upon, and these are used by search engines for rankings.

b)      <meta name=”description” content=”Calculate distance and bearing between two Latitude/Longitude points using Haversine formula”>

Likewise keywords, description are also used by search engines and they provide a short description about the page.

c)      <meta name=”author” content=”Chris Veness, v.chris@knowmore.co.uk“>

Author includes the author’s name and his website or perhaps his e-mail address.

d)     <meta name=”robots” content=”noindex”>

Robots allow the indexing by search engine spiders. They may also disallow indexing if it’s a spam.

e)      <meta name=”copyright” content=”January 2010″>

They provide valid copyright information.

  1. http-equiv: This information is not considered in search engine optimization. This is the information provided by the server to the web browser to display the page properly the way it was designed to be displayed. This attribute also contains the name-value pair as below. For example:

a)            <meta http-equiv=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1”

The most important attributes when using html and meta tags for search engine optimization are description and keywords. As websites containing duplicate content are penalized by the search engines, similarly if search engines find duplicate description and keywords in meta tags in spite of original content, search engines consider the webpage a duplicate of each other and do not consider it for indexing. Some of the criteria for using keywords are:

(1) They should be descriptive of the content of the webpage

(2) They should be chosen such that they include in enough number of search queries

(3) They should be selected targeting the market competition

(4) Frequency of occurrence of the keywords. Guideline for choosing descriptions is that they should provide a unique description of the webpage

 

Comments are closed.